Whether
or not you believe in the wrath of God, there is no question that
the wrath of the ungodly left is often on full display. As for the
latter, evangelist Pat Robertson got quite a liberal dose of it most
recently. The founder of the 700 Club was placed in the crosshairs
for suggesting that Ariel Sharon's stroke may be the result of his
division of Israel, an imprudent act incurring the wrath of God (Taking
a gander at Sharon, it seems more like the wrath of Twinkies).

No
lone comment inspired me to finally treat this issue. Really, this
is merely the latest in a series of culture war clashes involving
traditional Christian judgements about God's judgement and the "non-judgemental"
liberals' judgements about those judgements. You may remember the
hue and cry that ensued after 9/11 when Jerry Falwell implied that
America was being punished for having abandoned godly principles.
More recently there were those - such as Alabama State Senator Hank
Irwin - who opined that Hurricane Katrina was a whirlwind reaped by
a gulf coast rife with vice and sin, prompting derision from even
the likes of Rich Lowry.

As
for this man of faith, I don't know that any or all of these tribulations
were visited upon us by the Divine Hand. Likewise, however, I also
cannot say that all of them were not. What I do know is that this
issue isn't really about Falwell or Robertson or "fundamentalists,"
terrorism or storms or strokes, but something far, far deeper. It
is in fact about the spirit of the age and dogma, both the religious
and secular variety, that is.

Historically
speaking, the preponderance of the notion that God would never punish
man is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Western World. For most
of the history of Christendom - and the history of humanity, reaching
back to the pagan civilizations and primitive tribes of antiquity,
for that matter - the wrath of the supernatural was a given. When
pagans sacrificed humans on bloody altars, oft times the end was to
appease wrathful gods and gain their favor. If the rain didn't fall
upon thirsty crops and starvation loomed on the horizon, a people's
thinking was often that they had committed a mortal transgression
against divine will and remedial expiation was in order. And, while
Abe Foxman of the Anti-defamation League said that Robertson's comments
were ". . . a perversion of religion," the Hebrew Scriptures are replete
with stories of God visiting quite a variety of torments upon the
enemies of Foxman's ancestors.

Thus,
this "dark ages" idea was not some Christian shibboleth born of puritanical
morality but was simply the quite natural and instinctive perpetuation
of what had always impressed man as self-evident: that collectively
we are quite sinful and sometimes deserving of correction. What Christianity
did reveal was that God was a loving God who occasionally got angry,
not an angry god who occasionally was loving; he was not a god who
was like them, He was the God they were supposed to be like. Moreover,
we are called to atone for misdeeds through personal sacrifice, not
the sacrifice of persons.

Regardless,
Christian tradition always held that, in typical Sodom and Gomorrah
fashion, God may punish peoples who descend into turpitude. This is
why post-First Crusade failure to roll back Moslem gains inspired
medieval Christians to institute lay piety movements all across Europe:
they viewed the frustrated military campaigns as a sign of God's disfavor
and endeavored to make themselves worthy of victory over the menacing
hordes.

In
our time, though, the enlightened set scoffs at such "antiquated"
notions; they fancy themselves to be far too sophisticated to believe
that sin is real and punishment justified. One of them, one Paul Levinson
of the Fordham Media Studies Department, weighed in on the O'Reilly
Factor on January 6. He dismissed Robertson as a man who is not
very "modern" in his thinking ("Modernistic" would more aptly describe
what Levinson seems to espouse), as if that's a grand trespass. Transitioning
from the hubristic to the completely idiotic, he went on to liken
the evangelist to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man with
a long terrorist past and possibly a brief and terrible future. Levinson
justified the equivalency by saying that the two were both "fundamentalists"
(Lexicon note: a secularist who disagrees with a liberal is a Nazi;
a Christian who disagrees with a liberal is a fundamentalist).

Now,
lest I be misunderstood, I part company with Robertson on the etiological
factors in Sharon's stroke. However, I would have a question for Levinson:
is being a fundamentalist inherently bad? If so, what if you're a
liberal fundamentalist? And I say this not merely as a rhetorical
device. After all, Levinson and his fellow travelers seem to exhibit
a formulaic devotion to their leftist creed, deviation from which
is often treated as heresy. And this, I will add, hearkens back to
a pearl of wisdom from the great philosopher G.K. Chesterton. To wit:

"In
truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma
and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it."

Thus,
having dogma isn't inherently bad. It is the nature of the dogma that
determines its goodness or badness.

Today's
prevailing dogma states that God would never visit death and destruction
upon us for any reason, let alone in the exercise of a tool as clumsy
as punishment. Why, God is a loving God, you puerile fundies and Ultra-montanes.
Moreover, when devastation is wreaked and the carnage reveals both
the wicked and the good, the wizened and the budding babes, are we
to call it justice? Would a loving God so indiscriminately take life?

Without
a doubt, in an age in which Jesus is being portrayed as a milquetoasty
hippie type (The Book of Daniel), gussied up in the spiritual
fashions of the day and completely bereft of the depth and passion
evident in the Bible, such a New Age position may seem beyond question
. . . much like dogma. And in the theological universe of modernism
it does fit like a conforming piece in a jigsaw puzzle. The problem
is that this belief's adherents have the wrong puzzle, ensuring that
a traditionalist piece like God's wrath will be grossly incompatible.

Literally
put, the critics scoff when this element of orthodoxy cannot be explained
within the context of heterodoxy. They divorce themselves from any
semblance of traditional Christianity, embrace their modernistic mutation
of it, then wonder why anyone would think that the man's limb would
fit on the mutant's body.

So
now I will offer not answers, but explanations. But I will preface
my response by saying that if you don't believe in God, this will
seem like much ado about fairytales to you. I hasten to add, however,
that the prevailing criticism here is not to the effect of, "God doesn't
exist, therefore talk of God's wrath is silly." No, the bulk of the
criticism originates with people who acknowledge God's existence,
at least tacitly. They just find this brand of divine intervention
unfathomable.

It
is correct to say that God would never kill. This is because He never
does. He gives us the gift of life, and when He takes us from this
world we pass into the next and inherit eternal life. There is no
death. Moreover, if upon liberating us from the shackles of the material,
God takes us into Heaven, a place where pain is unknown and peace
and joy immeasurable, has He not done us a good turn?

Another
impediment to spiritual understanding is a misunderstanding involving
scientific understanding. The ancients had no trouble believing that
a storm, earthquake or some other natural phenomenon could be an instrument
of God's will any more than they had trouble viewing a sunrise or
a baby's birth as a miracle. We, though, are quite different. We learn
about barometric pressure, tectonic plates and seismic waves, planetary
rotation, conception and chromosomes, and then the scope of our understanding
of God's creation changes our understanding of God's scope. Our burgeoning
knowledge robs miracles of their mystery, and then we think it's a
mystery that anyone would claim that they're miracles.

It
really is a fascinating phenomenon. It's much like marveling at an
intellect that can ascertain a faraway star's distance from the Earth,
but then concluding it's nothing special upon hearing an explanation
of triangulation. We are left unimpressed because God hasn't worked
His wonders with the magical, but we always forget that the magical
fails to make us wonder once we understand it. God had to create the
world in some fashion, but had He done so in a different manner, would
we be more awed and faithful? Not if we could glean insight into His
methods, for it would always be the same old story. As Mark Twain
said, "Familiarity breeds contempt."

It's
ironic, if we were too dumb to penetrate the outer layer of God's
handiwork, faith would not be so elusive. Perhaps, though, our brilliance
in the scientific realm is equaled by our ignorance in the spiritual
one.

We
are children of God, like Him in that we possess intellect and free
will. Is it surprising then that those made in the image of He who
created the world would have an ability to understand that creation?
Would it make sense to grant these creatures dominion over the Earth
and enjoin them to subdue it without providing them with a capacity
to grasp its workings commensurate to that task? The irony is that
God gives us the ability to understand His world, and then we can't
understand how the world could be His.

Thus,
I wouldn't scoff at those who claim that God didn't direct a particular
storm at a hapless city or visit a certain ailment upon a given man,
but neither would I laugh at the claim that, were we to incur His
wrath, He might use the nature He created to effect His will. Nor
would I score those who don't attribute a certain terrorist act to
divine retribution, but I always accept that His "permitting will"
may allow worldly agents to be the instruments of His justice.

Naysayers
may mock such as fringe thinking. But if they expand their frame of
reference and tally the votes of all those who have existed from time
immemorial to the present, it will become obvious how they can identify
those on the periphery of consensus belief. They have only to look
in the mirror.

Then
there is the fact that punishment has become a dirty word. In another
wholesale departure from prescriptions based on the millennia of human
experience known as tradition, many among us eschew punishment, regarding
it an ineffectual tool of the unsophisticated. This is why we see
the embrace of the euphemistic "time-out" (which should be reserved
for athletic contests), the enactment of anti-spanking laws, parents
who are unable to control five-year-olds, and a judge who just sentenced
a man convicted of continually raping a young girl for four years
to a mere sixty days in jail. Then, laboring under the illusion that
our errancy is enlightenment, we take a leaf out of the ancient pagans'
book. Just as their gods were imbued with their own fallen nature,
we ascribe our characteristic failings - in this case pusillanimity,
the tolerance of evil, and gratuitous leniency - to God. We then fancy
Him to be more the divine therapist than the just judge.

Most
telling about the current state of Western civilization, however,
is the fact that those who claim God's wrath are so roundly subjected
to man's wrath. And a lack of piety alone doesn't explain it, for
a self-assured atheist would simply laugh such assertions off as the
superstitious musings of anachronistic minds. No, there's something
else at work here: pride.

Christendom
had long embraced the humbling truth that we are sinners, most deserving
of damnation. It had simultaneously been buoyed by the uplifting truth
that, despite this, we're not going to get what we deserve because
Jesus already paid the price. Now, in post-Christian America, we have
done a 180 degree about face. With our "I'm okay, you're okay" attitude,
self-esteem (a euphemism for pride) conditioning in schools, and the
New Age belief in the primacy of the self, some of us prance about
as if we had been immaculately conceived. Thus, the suggestion that
we may be deserving of a great chastisement and, by inference, that
we are proportionately corrupt, evokes howls from corpulent egos.

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And
perhaps this is what should truly raise the alarm. We can spend our
time crucifying the admonishers, or we can discover whether they are
pretenders or prophets by casting the probing eye inwards and seeing
if the emperor really has no clothes. And make no mistake, we would
be best served by doing the latter. After all, cultivating a collective
pride that blinds us to our faults is a sure path to oblivion.

Thus,
the real problem is not that we won't believe we have been subject
to punishment. Nay, with a society that is quickly making the seven
deadly sins a pastime as it slays virtue, the real problem is that
we don't think we deserve it.

Selwyn Duke lives in Westchester County, New
York. He's a tennis professional, internet entrepreneur and writer whose
works have appeared on various sites on the Internet, including Intellectual
Conservative, nenewamerica.us (Alan Keyes) and Mensnet. Selwyn has traveled
extensively in his life, visiting exotic locales such as India, Morocco
and Algeria and quite a number of other countries while playing the international
tennis circuit.